An Open Perspective for Educational Games

In the field of computers in education, educational digital games have potential to involve more issues of motivation and involvement, considering their possibilities for higher level of interaction and engagement. However, years of research have shown that the impact of educational games is lower than expected, especially the difficulty to adapt them to different educational contexts, such as with different educational, linguistic, cultural and social aspects. In that sense, this article presents an open perspective on the development of educational games, emphasizing the challenges related to their development and their effective potential for use in education, proposing that they be designed as Open Educational Resources (OER). From this perspective, it is expected to support communities that would aggregate developers (programmers, game designers, media producers, etc.) and users (teachers and students) so they can work collaboratively in creating educational games in an open way.

Ethics: What is the Research Scenario in the Brazilian Symposium SBIE?

There is no doubt about the relevance of Computing in Education (CE), especially after the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the more we deal with computational artifacts in Education, the more we will have to face ethical dilemmas and concerns behind the engineering of the educational artifact and its values and qualities. In the context of the Brazilian Symposium on Computers in Education (SBIE), this paper aims to answer the question: what is the panorama of the occurrence of ethical aspects in SBIE publications between 2011-2020? To answer this question, we followed the methodology of Systematic Literature Review. We analyze topics such as Informed Consent, Ethics Committee, technological domains, ethical principles, and research contexts.

What Research Tells Us: Multiple Texts

Chapter 5 opens by looking at the growth of computers in education and of online search technology. Today’s easy availability of online documents is profoundly reshaping the reading students are asked to do, diminishing traditional focus on single texts. Skills for searching online, scrutinizing sources, and synthesizing results are now emphasized in school curricula. One consequence has been a parallel focus on these skills in middle school and high school standardized testing. We examine research on students’ success in mastering these skills and consider how the emphasis on multiple online texts may be changing what we mean by “reading”. Less is known about students’ comparative ability to handle multiple print versus multiple digital documents, though we review some existing research. Our discussion reveals the relevance of document authenticity, distinctiveness, and physical senses in how we comprehend and interpret texts.